Word: prefer
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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RICHARD NIXON cannot be called a hawk on the Viet Nam war. He wants the U.S. out, and he would prefer to bargain toward the exit rather than fight his way there. He has begun to reduce the American force level in Viet Nam. In May the President put forward a conciliatory negotiating position, inviting the Communists to discuss it seriously. Yet the impasse and killing continue. If presidential ferocity is not to blame, perhaps a kind of optimism...
...Britain's top labor leader, Vic Feather must try to hold sway over 155 fiercely independent unions that often prefer to behave, as one union boss put it, like "baronies in a kingless kingdom." At Portsmouth, where Feather was elected to a four-year term as head of the Trades Union Congress last month, the barons were flexing their muscles. "The problem is not that we have too many strikes," cried one official, "but that we don't have enough...
...course, some people are naturally conservative: they prefer to avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don't believe in going out on a limb when they don't know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality must be junked and replaced with the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around a point...
...might argue that it must be serious, since it is forbidden. But I would prefer merely to say that it is serious because it is the major commitment of the best undergraduates at Harvard. No one can pretend to have a clear vision of what happened two weeks ago if he fails to realize that the brightest and most creative people at Harvard were in University Hall at 5 a.m. Thursday morning...
...right, of course, about the third alternative, and a very sensible one it is-working out some system of fooling the grader: although I think I should prefer the word "impressing." We admit to being impressionable, but not hypercredulous simps. His first two tactics for system-beating, his Vague Generalities and Artful Equivocations, seem to presume the latter, and are only going to convince CRIMSON-reading graders (and there a few and we tell our friends) that the time has come to tighten the screws just a bit more...